Thread: Wireless Internet

I had it once. Works nice, but then we moved house and the walls here just kill the signal, so it became useless.

Well, you certainly have valid reasons, so I'm sure your Mom will come to her senses soon enough.

As for me, I have a wireless connection at home and at camp, but there's just something about being solidly plugged into a LAN that feels so much more kickass.

At one point my Dad wasn't even going to switch over to broadband -- but then he used my Lappy, and realized how much dial-up SUCKS in comparison. (No offense, Kaniaz.)

My last memories of dial-up include downloading a 29.1MB old cartoon -- Der Fuehrer's Face, classic WWII-era Disney, now banned. I started downloading, went into the other room and played Windwaker (from the beginning), beat it, walked back in and checked on the dowload, went back to Windwaker, beat it again, and again, and again, went back to check on the download, went back to Windwaker, beat it AGAIN, went back and it was done.

I have a wireless network in my house. It is awesome. Especially if you have a laptop because then you can sit in your room, porch, living room or even backyard with it and still be on the internet. Also its good if you have a Pocket PC with WiFi.

Yep, WLAN is great for getting rid of a few cables. Decently fast as well if it's good equipment and not to bad location, enough for most internet connections.

Ah yeah, Pocket PCs and stuff. I have a Palm that's wirelessly enabled, and I can use it to surf the internet from the luxury of my bed. It's good for that too. But the whole wall-killing thing just sucked ass. Had to get the cables out and hook them all up.

Wireless is definatly your solution.

In terms of security, WEP 128bit is all very well, but make sure you use a long password when you generate the encryption key-

a 6 character 128bit WEP password can be broken in 30 seconds flat with a brute force attack, where as a 13 character password takes 30 minutes or more.

To avoid bad reception from walls, do a site survey, set up the router and laptop and move them about to various locations to test the reception. THen you can leave the router in a sutible spot. Remember to adjust the antennas aswell, the angle of them can have a tremendous impact on signal strength.

Do not be fooled by MAC Address Filtering, it often catches out kids, but a war driver with a wireless laptop and a packet sniffer application will not have trouble finding a privileged MAC address and spoofing it.

Originally posted by latency
Wireless is definatly your solution.

In terms of security, WEP 128bit is all very well, but make sure you use a long password when you generate the encryption key-

a 6 character 128bit WEP password can be broken in 30 seconds flat with a brute force attack, where as a 13 character password takes 30 minutes or more.

To avoid bad reception from walls, do a site survey, set up the router and laptop and move them about to various locations to test the reception. THen you can leave the router in a sutible spot. Remember to adjust the antennas aswell, the angle of them can have a tremendous impact on signal strength.

Do not be fooled by MAC Address Filtering, it often catches out kids, but a war driver with a wireless laptop and a packet sniffer application will not have trouble finding a privileged MAC address and spoofing it.

You seem to know alot more about this than me... i just have two quick questions
Whats the maximum characters you can use in a password?
Do you know if using an encryption slows the speed?
thanks

I don't know the maximum in length but with mine my brother set it up with 20 or so characters.

Using encryption does slow the speed. (And don't you dare use a dictionary word when you set up the password). But even though it slows the speed, it's not enough for your internet connection to get slowed by it. So it's not really a problem.

To avoid bad reception from walls, do a site survey, set up the router and laptop and move them about to various locations to test the reception. THen you can leave the router in a sutible spot. Remember to adjust the antennas aswell, the angle of them can have a tremendous impact on signal strength. [/b]

That was no good for me, and probably the same if you live in a house with SuperHappyFunSignalKillingWalls™.

Yea, wireless internet would definately be the way to go.We have a wireless router which is nice with the laptop and pda,and the signal is fairly strong (I can still get my signal about a quarter mile away) but we've still got like a mile of wires running underneath our house to the router, because I prefer my computer to be plugged into the router, personal preference I suppose.

I have no idea how the encryption and shit is setup since my dad did all that and wouldn't let me near it for fear that I'd break something.(stupid paranoid bastard, I don't break everything I touch...just most things.)So yea, I can't be much help, anyway, that's my two cents.

~ffx~

Encryption does slow the network down slightly, but as said, it's not enough to have a serious impact on transfers, and cirtainly not enough to slow the internet down.

I also second the dictionary word thing, as all the computers will have saved the network password, you're free to make it as horrificly complicated as you like.

When somebody uses the microwave at my house it temporarily kills the 802.11b wireless network.

Kind of annoying...

Originally posted by theroguechemist
When somebody uses the microwave at my house it temporarily kills the 802.11b wireless network.

Kind of annoying...

Yeah i have things like that happen to me... whenever my phone talks to the network my speakers start buzzing and no sound comes out of them anymore. Will this affect any wireless network?(sorry if this is a stupid question i dont know much about radio waves)

the microwave might be annoying since it sits about 2 feet away from my computer(had to switch to LCD, it also screws up tube monitors)

Two feet away? That's not very healthy for the computer or you. Move it somewhere else.